RAF 2203 ''Latvija'', the car/van that was made in Latvia

Hello, everybody. I’m proud of being Latvian, even tho it has had a hard time in the history and isn’t the best place now too.
This time I’m gonna talk about one of the few mass produced cars (I guess you could call it a van too) from Latvia. Anyway, first I have to tell you how production was in the Soviet Union.
So, everything that was made in the Soviet Countries was sent to Russia and only small portion stays in the country it was made in. For example, in the town I was born there was a big factory where they made clothes, pillows, blankets- stuff like that, everyone in that town had to work in the factory or for the factory. It basically supplied big part of Soviet Union with clothes. But guess what, in Latvia, people were short of clothes.
Also, people worked in factories for a small money, but people in Russia worked less hard and got more money.

That was probably boring to read and all that, so let’s start talking about the actual car.

So, what is RAF? RAF means ‘’Rīgas Autobusu Fabrika’’ which translates to ‘’Bus Factory of Riga’’.
The first factory was built in 1955, in Riga, later they built another one in Jelgava (in 1969). They produced busses and vans before, but I will probably talk about those in some other post (there were not much), but the RAF 2203 was the most popular out of them.

The start of it
So, two groups of engineers were competing, each created their own design and came up with prototypes for the new ‘’Latvija’’ (Pictures above). The commission chose the second prototype, but the one dude running everything said ‘’No, I want the first one’’ so they started building the car after the first prototype. Yeap, that’s how it worked in the Soviet Union.

In 1976 the new factory in Jelgava started the work and brand new RAF 2203’s started going off its conveyers. The vans quickly started to get popular and got sent to the Soviet Union. This version was made till 1990 and around 19 thousand were sold and they were really used for a lot of things.

Ambulance in Ukraine.

Taxi in Latvia.

A dungeon on wheels.

Specs
It had a 4 cylinder carbureted engine that could pump out great 95 horsepower. It weight about 2700kg had a four-speed manual transmission and could reach speeds of 120 km/h.
It had drum brakes, but for some later versions, front wheels got disc brakes.

At the last years they made few a bit more powerful versions where they also managed to squeeze in 13 persons in place of the 12 in other models, but they were not that good because the front of the vehicle was heavier (so if the van was empty it would slide about in winter with it’s RWD layout) and the trunk was much smaller.

In 1997 sales were really low, so the RAF closed and the 2203 went out of production as the most popular van in the Soviet Union.

Thanks very much for reading, hope you learn something new today. I have plans on making more of these posts about some more vehicles that I know about, but this is the one that was mass produced, and it was the only one.